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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Thursday, 24 June 2004) . . Page.. 2740 ..

offences for trafficking are a good example because they apply not only to selling and possessing controlled drugs to sell but also to preparing and packaging the drugs for supply and transporting, guarding or concealing them for selling or engaging in such activities believing that someone else intends to sell the drugs.

There is also a comprehensive range of additional offences that are not currently in the Drugs of Dependence Act. These include offences of receiving money or property derived from a drug offence and concealing, transferring, converting or removing money or property from the ACT that has been derived from a drug offence.

There are also new offences of possessing equipment, substances and instructions with the intention of manufacturing or cultivating controlled drugs or plants and related but more serious offences of supplying others with such equipment and instructions etc so that they may manufacture or cultivate controlled drugs and plants.

Like the Drugs of Dependence Act chapter 6 has an offence of supplying drugs to a child but it also includes two new important offences for the protection of children. They are offences of procuring a child to traffic in drugs and supplying drugs to a child for trafficking, for which maximum penalties of 25 years’ imprisonment applies.

One of the more significant improvements this Bill will make to the drug laws in the ACT is the inclusion of offences with respect to “precursors”. Essentially, “precursors” are the raw chemical components of a controlled drug.

Many precursors are present in products that are readily available off the shelf in pharmacies (eg Sudafed), supermarkets and hardware stores and are commonly extracted in backyard laboratories to manufacture controlled drugs, particularly amphetamines. The problem has become particularly acute over recent years and accordingly chapter 6 includes a range of offences to deal with those who manufacture, sell or possess “controlled precursors” to manufacture controlled drugs.

Chapter 6 also includes a range of provisions to improve the effectiveness and enforceability of the offences in the Bill. Perhaps the most important improvement concerns controlled drugs that are commonly sold in a diluted form on the black market.

For those drugs the regulations will specify different prohibited weights for the drugs in their pure form and in a mixture - which of course will be set at a higher weight. The prosecution will then be able to elect to establish the quantity of the drug involved in an offence by reference to the pure drug weight or the mixed drug weight.

At present, quantity is determined in the ACT by reference to the pure weight, however, other Australian jurisdictions are divided on the method they employ. The officers’ committee assessed the arguments for both methods and concluded that there are significant advantages and disadvantages to both.

Accordingly, it recommended that either measure could be used. In addition to encouraging uniformity, this measure will also ensure that expensive and scarce resources for analysing purity are not unnecessarily wasted. The Bill also includes a number of provisions that allow the prosecution to prove the quantity of the drug

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